The euphemism imperative

President Barack Obama was proud to become the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood last Friday. But not proud enough to utter the word “abortion.”

The right to abortion is the sneakiest, most shame-faced of all American rights. Its most devoted supporters don’t dare speak its name. They hide behind evasion and euphemism and cant.

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So Obama sang a hymn of praise to Planned Parenthood at the organization’s annual conference without mentioning what makes it so distinctive and controversial. He said it is a group women “count on for so many important services.” He said its core principle is “that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health.” He excoriated opponents involved “in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health.”

Listening to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that the country is riven by a fierce dispute over whether women should be allowed to choose their own ob-gyns or decide whether to take contraceptives or to get cancer screenings. One side is pro-women’s health, the other anti. In his speech, the president said the word “cancer” seven times. About that he is happy to be straightforward.

Imagine if he had been similarly frank about the rest of Planned Parenthood’s work: “In 2011, according to your annual report, your clinics or affiliates performed 330,000 abortions. That’s a lot of abortion. Over 10 years more than 3 million. Thank you, Planned Parenthood. Think of all those women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies and you were there for them. That’s what you do. That’s what you are about. And that’s what this country is about.”

Before that crowd, he might have gotten rousing applause, but talking in such honest terms would have been a gross faux pas. Planned Parenthood’s image is dependent on averting eyes from its central purpose. According to a poll commissioned by the National Right to Life Committee, fifty-five percent of people don’t realize that Planned Parenthood performs abortions. In the past, Obama has said Planned Parenthood does mammograms, when it doesn’t.

The unwritten rule is that when the left discusses abortion it is never called “abortion,” but always referred to as “health” or, more specifically “reproductive health” — although abortion is the opposite of reproduction and for one party involved, the opposite of health. The former National Abortion Rights Action League, and then the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, finally settled on the name NARAL Pro-Choice America, effacing all reference to the procedure that it holds in such high esteem.

This is a strange reticence. The National Rifle Association doesn’t get defensive when it is pointed out that it protects the right to bear arms which allows people to buy guns. Charlton Heston, in the famous photo-op, didn’t hesitate to lift a musket over his head. The organization isn’t about to remove the word “rifle” from its name. The NRA conducts courses on how to handle guns safely, but Wayne LaPierre doesn’t try to pass himself off as concerned only with “munitions safety.”